I actually found it quite robinhood for openai to acqhire, bascially this startup was my favourite thing for the past few months, but they were experiencing server overload and other issues on reliability, i think openai taking them under their wing is a good/neutral storyline. I think its net good for science given the opai toolchain

"Hey, you know how everybody's complaining about AI making up totally fake science shit? Like, fake citations, garbage content, fake numbers, etc?"

"Sure, yes, it comes up all the time in circles that talk about AI all the time, and those are the only circles worth joining."

"Well, what if we made a product entirely focused on having AI generate papers? Like, every step of the paper writing, we give the AI lots of chances to do stuff. Drafting, revisions, preparing to publish, all of it."

"I dunno, does anybody want that?"

"Who cares, we're fucked in about two years if we don't figure out a way to beat the competitors. They have actual profits, they can ride out AI as long as they want."

"Yeah, I guess you're right, let's do your scientific paper generation thing."

This assumes that the article, the artifact, is most valuable. But often it is the process of writing the article that has the most value. Prism can be a nice tool for increasing output. But the second order consequence could be that the skill of deep thinking and writing will atrophy.

"There is no value added without sweating"

Adding

% !TEX program = lualatex

to the top of your document allows you to switch LaTeX engine. This is required for recent accessibility standards compliance (support for tagging and \DocumentMetadata). Compilation takes a bit longer though, but works fine, unlike with Overleaf where using the lualatex engine does not work in the free version.

Not too bad an acquisition though. Scientists need more tech tools just like everyone else to accelerate their work. The faster scientists are, the more discoveries & world class solutions to problems we can have.

Maybe OpenAI should acquire Valyu too. They allow you deepresearch on academic papers.

I'm really surprised OpenAI went with LaTeX. ChatGPT still has issues maintaining LaTeX syntax. It still happily switches to markdown notation for quotes or emph. Gemini has a similar problem as well. I guess that there aren't enough good LaTeX documents in the training set.

There is zero chance this is worth billions of dollars, let alone the trillion$ OpenAI desparately needs. Why are they wasting time with this kind of stuff? Each of their employees needs to generate insane amounts of money to justify their salaries and equity and I doubt this is it.

I used overleaf during grad school and was easy enough, I'm interested to see what more value this will bring. Sometimes making less decisions is the better route, e.g. vi vs MS word, but I won't speak too much without trying it just yet.

Away from applied math/stats, and physics etc, not that many scientists use LaTeX. I'm not saying it's not useful, just I don't think many scientists will feel like a product that's LaTeX based is intended for them.

<typst>and just when i thought i was out they pull me back in</typst>